THE COALS GLOW DARKLY IN the cave, my stomach growling as I listen to Loss’s deep breaths that sound like sleep. I’m unprepared for when Luokai pokes me in the back, his eyes alert. “I need to tell you something.…” He flinches as Loss stirs, rolling over.
“Are you two talking?” The rougher blinks blearily in my direction. “Get some shut-eye. Not many things that won’t keep till morning.”
I shrink down in the sleeping bag Loss let me borrow from the cave’s supplies, his knife a heavy weight at my side. That’s put-on sleepiness, sure thing. He’s waiting for whatever he wasn’t eating in the porridge to start working. Maybe it puts people to sleep?
“I…” Luokai’s words slur. “The thing we were looking for went… like the mom.”
Luokai was already eating when I got here. Could I have stopped this? What is he saying? What mom? We’re looking for Sev, who had a mom.
“And…” Luokai blinks heavily, looking down at the little lights dancing across the backs of his hands like fireflies in summer. “Sole hasn’t spoken to me in days. But it’s still… like I’m… my brother. This was his link first.”
Definitely drugged. I roll a little closer, glancing carefully at Loss. Luokai doesn’t seem to be hurt, just… sleepy. What does he mean by saying Sev’s like her mom? Her mom isn’t breathing anymore.
“He was supposed to have gotten to her by now. He was so sick when he left.…” Luokai takes another of those rib-cracking breaths of his, but it hisses out of him like a balloon leaking air. “If he’d gotten there all right… she would have said something.” He’s glaring at his hand now, swiping at the lights as if he doesn’t remember how to make them go away.
Howl was sick. Sev’s like her mom.…
Is he saying he thinks they’re both dead?
The fire has brought the feeling back into my limbs, but every inch of me ices over, and no matter how far down into my sleeping bag I burrow, Luokai’s there looking at me, and this… this information he’s been keeping back from me…
Luokai slumps down to the floor, his hand going slack around the link. I ease forward, checking his heartbeat, his breathing. Hoping that the fact they are still there means something.
They can’t be dead. I told them they couldn’t die. Couldn’t leave me with SS sucking at my ankles and clouding my brain.
But dead happens quick. I’ve seen it too many times not to know.
I shut my eyes, but then it’s Sev in there. Bloodless. Cold. Lying in the dark of Underneath. They can’t die because I’m not good enough. I can’t take care of Lihua, Peishan, and the rest. I’m like Dad too now. Like Luokai. No one can trust me. Not without Sev and her cure.
The flames sink lower and lower as if they can feel my heart flickering out. Lying back with my eyes open, I count the seconds one at a time as if that will force time to stop, to go back until Luokai gives a great snore, a long rasping gurgle I’ve never heard from him before.
My insides try to swallow themselves down when Loss sits up. Looks Luokai and me over to make sure we’re still. Stands. Picks up his pack and walks out.
Whatever happens to Sev or Howl or me or any of us, I can’t leave Peishan and the others to whatever was in Loss’s porridge. I wait until the rougher’s clear of the entrance before following. The air is warmer than earlier, full of the promise of snow. No moon to give me light, but it only takes a second to find Loss’s shadow creeping down the hill. Headed toward the river and the boat wreck.
Cai Ayi and her roughers scavenge when they can, and that’s fine. That’s their business. But luring Luokai up to the cave instead of pushing him into the river, then trying to drug the both of us… It’s different. Desperate, if we’re not the first people Loss has brought up here to rob. Loss’s cheeks were dirty, red from cold, his mask chafing at his skin. Desperation might not even be the half of it.
I run back to the cave and check Luokai to make sure he’s still breathing before taking his dry socks and the outer layer of his robe that he’s tucked under his head like a pillow. Tuck the extra layer around me tight, zip my coat, warmed and dried by the fire, to my chin. Then I take Loss’s knife, the one he set right at my feet when I asked, and stick it in my belt. Put up my hood. Sneak up the hill toward the Post.
It’s a few hours’ walk, the cold gnawing at me through my winter clothes, the sun’s first rays barely threatening to break overhead by the time I get to the Post’s trees.
Or, where they’re supposed to be, because instead of trees and platforms and old friends and almost family, there’s nothing but fire-torn skeleton trunks. Ash coats the snow, along with half-burned planks that fell from up above. And there are footprints, so many footprints, muddy and black in the old snow.
My wind rustles the leaves behind me, hanging back.
And then I see them, my eyes catching the blackened bit. Bones. Sun and skies and cold and everything I love. My kids were supposed to be here, and instead there are bones.
“June?” Loss must have walked double quiet and double slow so I didn’t hear. His breath hisses through his mask, the sound at least thirty feet away. “Don’t move yourself an inch, okay? I don’t want to hurt you.”
Now my wind fails me? She who warns me when there are Reds and Menghu and gores and Dad and water, and suddenly I’m drowning and alone, so alone. I start running before Loss can catch me, my hand on the long knife stuck in my belt.
“June stop. There are too many Sephs around here to survive in this part of the woods.” His feet pound the snow behind me, everything inside me pounding along with them as I look for somewhere to hide. The trees are ashy and broken, too burned to hold my weight. “June, let me help you!”
My feet move still faster, scurrying over rocks and between dead trees. Loss didn’t follow me up here to chat, and he’s stupid if he thinks I’ll listen to him play like he’s nice now. He didn’t lie about the kids then try to put me to sleep because he wanted to help me. Panic is a bubble inside me, about to pop, waiting for my foot to catch on a rock or a root. Loss knows this area, knows the trees, the ground. His legs are longer, faster. Even if I don’t fall a single time, Loss can follow my footprints just as well as I could follow his.
“They burned it when you left.” Loss’s voice pinches as he calls after me. “Burned us all out. I think some of those kids might have gotten to the ground okay, but I don’t know how they would have gotten past Red guns. I’m sorry about your friend and his boat, but a guy’s got to survive out here.” Loss swears, and I hear him trip behind me.
I veer uphill, toward where Sev and Tai-ge and me landed the heli… Was it really only a few weeks ago? I don’t know. How long was I Asleep? And if the Post is gone, then what’s left of the world I know? If I get away from Loss, where is there left to go?
What does he want with me?
The question spurs my feet all the faster. If I don’t run, I’ll find out, and then SS won’t have a chance to suck me down to Underneath. Loss’ll put me there faster than any compulsion could.
Uphill. To the rocks. The unburned trees. Up to the zip line Sev and I used to escape the Post when Loss and Cai Ayi were coming after us, Reds shooting up from the ground. They burned Cai Ayi. They burned the roughers. Peishan, Sev’s friend-but-not-friend from the City.
“June, it’s not a bad place I’m taking you!” My ears prick, but my feet don’t slow as I scramble up the snowbanks. “They need hands on the farms.”
Loss wants to chain me up with the City slaves? That’s worse than Underneath. My heart pounds hard against my chest as I come to a spot I can’t climb. I turn around, looking for him, his voice bouncing off the trees. All the hair up and down my arms stands up on end as he comes into view, tears making uncomfortable trails down my cheeks.
I’m trapped.
“They’ll give you a bed. Maybe even Mantis—that’s what they promised. You’ll be safe. Safer than that guy you’re with.” He reaches out, moving slow. “I’m probably saving you from whatever he wanted—”
Lihua. I left Lihua, a little girl so much smaller than me. I ran straight to the top of the zip line with Sev and cut all the ropes that would have been everyone’s emergency escape so they couldn’t follow us.
I left everyone at the Post to burn.
Scooting out of reach just before Loss can grab me, I scramble through a snarl of dead bushes and roots, sending the branches back to snap in his face. My feet skid on the ice, the trees around me dressed in needles and bark instead of ash and char, so I’m past the burned part of the wood. The world seems to narrow, the Circle tightening until it’s just me and the rougher’s heavy breaths as he squeezes after me through the dense trees. But then the world yawns wide again because I find what I’m looking for: the Post’s emergency exit. The zip-line cable.
I can feel the fizz of a compulsion at the back of my head, but not what it’s going to tell me to do. All I know is it can’t happen. Not if I want to live. I take a deep breath, like Luokai says. Focus on what’s right in front of me. Try to blank out the thought of Loss sprinting through the snow after me.
Breathe. The wind is here with me. Breathe or it will be your own lungs that kill you. Not Loss.
The cable’s a black slice against the sky. It leads me to a tree naked of leaves, a rope dangling down from one of the top branches. I don’t need the ladder made from old boards nailed into its side to climb to a crux in the tree above the rope where the branches bend under my weight.
Loss stops at the base of the tree, his eyes squinting up into the shadows after me. “Don’t make this worse than it has to be. It’ll be a better life!”
There’s a bag tied to this tree, up in its highest branches. I know it because I tied it here myself. Years ago, when one of the roughers first brought us to the Post. They found us, Dad’s tongue cut out by Parhat’s knife, bleeding as if everything inside him was about to come out.
I had to know there was a way out. Up in the trees it seems like there’s no way to go but down. I think it was Loss himself who showed me the zip line. After I rode it down to test it, over and over until Cai Ayi laughed and told me to stop playing games, I left something here at the top, just in case sliding down the line wasn’t enough. I’d learned that if people wanted to chase you—if they knew where you were the way Parhat had the day he cut out Dad’s tongue—they’ll follow you until the job is done. A zip line wasn’t going to change that.
I needed a secret. So I tied one up in the tree.
Loss seems about to explode, his softened voice crumbling to thorns at the edges. “June. Please come down. We both know I can get up there just as well as you. I really don’t want to hurt you, but I’ll drag you the whole way by your hair if you make me.”
I pull out his long knife, early morning sunlight glinting on the metal, and cut open the old canvas bag I tied up here.
“June? What are you…”
Holding it out where he can see it, I throw the blade directly at Loss’s head.
He swears, sidestepping so the heavy knife lands blade-first in the snow at his feet. Then looks up at me, puzzled. “That was dumb.” He bends to pick up the blade. “Why throw your only weapon—”
The back of his neck, exposed when he bends over, makes an easy target. The first stone from my bag hits him with a meaty thunk. He doesn’t have time to recover before I throw the next and the next, the stones hitting his head and neck until he doesn’t move anymore, slumped over the knife where it hit the ground.
I breathe deep, trying not to look at the blood that marks the snow where the rocks skittered away from Loss’s body. The gore inside me gives an appreciative grumble, and for once, the wind is there too, patting my cheek and agreeing with the gore.
I didn’t compulse. But that just means this bad thing is mine. No Tian telling me I had to, no Dad with his ribs showing. No SS twisting my head. I chose the rocks and the blood.
I am the bad thing that no one wanted. That no one could survive for. Not even Dad.